overreach

it has been a bad week for labour. the loss of discs from her majesty’s customs and excise, which contain the personal details of 25 million people, appears to be a disaster too far.
with luck it will halt the onward march of the id card campaign.

but is it really a crisis for the government as such?
according to cameron and the conservative party it is.
odd that.
on the one hand cameron and his team are constantly telling people that the government is too powerful and that it needs to withdraw more from the public landscape: “let businesses and people get on with their own lives”, seems to be the rallying cry. yet the moment something goes wrong the tories shout out that the government is not showing a firm hand and is not leading.

for all of the politicking that has gone on over this issue the key point that gets forgotten is that there is nothing that you can do to ever eliminate human error.

there is no doubt that something drastically wrong has occurred, but it is a failure of a few individuals in the civil service rather than the failure of a government minister. to pretend otherwise is to wilfully ignore the facts and to engage in cheap crass point scoring (but then that is something that cameron and co love to do).

i agree with david cameron that this situation does highlight one of the many dangers of the proposed id card scheme. after the loss of the discs no one will feel safe about their personal details being on a government database. it is not just a question of the safety of the data but also who has access to the data and who administers the data.
if the id scheme gets dropped then this disaster will have one happy conclusion.

but david cameron is on about government over-reach, in a speech in the czech capital (pop quiz – what is the name of the czech capital?) he described this over-reach as being an “enemy of freedom”.
"this week we saw a shocking consequence of this bureaucratic over-reach: a scandal where the government has lost the names, addresses and bank details of almost every family in the country." said cameron.
now consider that carefully.
what is cameron actually saying is the over-reach here, bear in mind that government had these details for a purpose, that of the paying of child benefit.
so is the over-reach the having details of the recipients of the benefit (and we all know that if they didn’t have the right information to ensure the right people were being paid the right amount then that would be a different type of failure altogether.
or is the over-reach that the state is paying child benefit?


just how are the conservatives going to cut over-reach? simple they are just going to collect less data. less to lose then, and with less data to manage the savings made can go back into paying the benefits.
sorry i was just pulling your legs there…
of course the way they are going to cut down on government over-reach is to cut down on government programmes. with fewer programmes to worry about there is less need for data. even better the money saved means bigger tax cuts to the rich – because when they have more money they spend it so that is a big yay to economy. no point cutting the tax to the poor, as they will just try to save it. that is a hearty boo to the poor for just thinking of themselves.

cameron does point out that new labour isn’t doing this out of spite, but because they believe it is the right thing to do. it is just, as cameron declares, that this belief that “officialdom knows best” is now an outmoded ideology.
except of course when your view is the one that says we need to get rid of the state – then officialdom does know best.
but child benefit (and other benefits) will still need to be paid (though much harder to get from a conservative, albeit compassionate, government), but never fear when the state can’t provide the market will step in (as if has done in places like utilities and transport – all the profit little of the risk) to provide the needy with the provision of benefits. but now the government won’t keep your data it will be with a conglomerate. see feeling safer already (fingers crossed that is not group 4).

just remember cameron isn’t talking about the data when he says over-reach is bad, he really means the services we are getting. he doesn’t like them and he doesn’t want ordinary people being able to get them.





(answer: prague)